For suppliers to survive in the business world, they must keep their customers happy. Happy customers are repeat customers and also lead to new customers. One obvious way to keep customers happy is to provide good quality products. However, this is not enough in today's competitive business environment. Customers demand good service. A key element in providing good service is to communicate effectively with customers.
Today's digital economy helps communication between suppliers and customers immensely. The Internet especially facilitates this effective communication between suppliers and customers. A concept referred to as B2B (“business to business”) leverages the Internet to gain a closer alignment with customers to ensure a good, solid relationship with customers, which helps the bottom line and gives a supplier a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If the supplier can help their customers become more profitable, then the customers will ensure that the suppliers are also profitable.
The power industry is one industry that has not fully embraced B2B. One reason may be because suppliers in the power industry sell customers very large and expensive devices. These devices typically have a very long lifecycle, which means customers do not purchase these devices on a daily basis.